Here are a few stories to read this final Monday in 2022.

• Keith Holyoak asks whether AI could ever write poetry. 
• Jonathan Bailey is right in that AI doesn’t have to be great, just good enough. The tech is in its early stages, so like any tech it just has to be an MVP (minimum viable product) to succeed.
• WSJ looks at the suffering of book hoarders having to weed their libraries. 
• As Electric Lit points out, one of the problems with Zoom is that mentally we think we are alone even though everyone can see us. This leads to all sorts of “interesting” behaviors. 
• That story about Tor Books using an AI-generated image as a book cover is a lot less (and more) interesting that at first glance.  Apparently the cover designer bought it from a stock photo site. (I for one think the fact they got the artwork from a stock photo site rather than commissioning an artist is much more interesting than its AI origin.)
• The US Copyright Office accepts and then challenged the copyright registration for a comic book which uses AI-generated art. (I think they erred – if the comic book has text written by a human, and was laid out by a human, then it is as copyrightable as any novel which uses publics domain or other works which can’t be copyrighted.)
• To understand the problem with the Copyright Office’s decision, let’s consider a book cover on a novel (see the Tor Books story above). If you write a novel and use an AI-generated image as part of the book cover, according to the Copyright Office your novel cannot be copyrighted. That is simply wrong.